In a previous article titled "Did Earth 'Steal' Martian Water?", I mentioned that a close encounter between Mars and Earth occurred ca. 12,500 BP (10,500 BC). Mars was knocked close to Earth by Venus which, at the time, was a cometary body. The past cometary nature of Venus has been amply theorized by Velikovsky and demonstrated by recent observations.

However, the abovementioned article left a lot of questions concerning Venus.

What happened to Venus after it interacted with Mars? How long did it take for Venus to acquire its current circular, planetary orbit? Did cometary Venus have other interactions with planet Earth? How many passes did Venus make before it acquired a stable orbit? What were the dates of those passes? What were their effects?

One of the major exemplars of the philosophical movement known as Stoicism almost 2000 years ago, Epictetus, a former slave, had much to say about taking the right approach to life. Through his teachings, which culminated in the dictated works of his Discourses and Enchiridion, Epictetus expounded on what virtuous living meant and what it should look like - not through theory, but through actual examples drawn from real life and the psychological attitudes one can adopt to make for a more trouble-free life and a 'tranquil' existence.

On this week's MindMatters, we take a look at the very influential teachings of Epictetus. Much like Gurdjieff (and perhaps even an inspiration to him?) we see how even centuries after his description of the 'art of living', his wisdom and insights into the human condition could not be more relevant for our own thinking and ways of living today.

Comment: In light of the 'COVID-19 pandemic', which - despite its mortality rate being blown up out of all proportion to reality - is, nevertheless, indeed an illness stemming from infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus first discovered by the Chinese in Wuhan in December 2019, and in light of their pointed accusation against a certain US bio-lab in Maryland being a possible source of the virus, we're re-running this exposé from a couple of years ago concerning the massive global bio-weapons laboratory infrastructure that the US maintains...

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian investigative journalist and Middle East Correspondent. Over the last two years she has published a series of reports on weapons smuggling to ISIS in Syria. In the past year she came under pressure from the Bulgarian National Security Agency and was fired from her job in the Bulgarian newspaper Trud Daily, without explanation. Despite this, Dilyana continues her investigations. The following report, first published on South Front, provides an overview of the Pentagon's secretive development of biological weapons in bio-labs around the world.

The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. Bio warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program - Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) - and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.

Comment: So much for Nixon ending the US deep state's mad science bio-weapons program in 1969.

The Pentagon's bio-weapon Frankenstein-research is not only alive and well, like NATO, it has metastasized since the collapse of the USSR, spreading into Africa, the Middle East, and on Russia's doorstep.

President Putin noted the uptick in US bio-research focused on 'Russians/Caucasians' last October and, addressing Russia's Human Rights Council, said:

"[...] do you know that biological material is being collected all over the country, from different ethnic groups and people living in different geographical regions of the Russian Federation? The question is - why is it being done? It's being done purposefully and professionally. We are a kind of object of great interest."

Franz Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council's Committee for Defense and Security went on to add this on his Facebook page:

"I'm not saying that it is about preparing a biological war against Russia. But its scenarios, are, no doubt, being worked on. That is to say, in case the need arises."

It may, for now, remain more sci-fi than fact, but the concept of ethnic-specific weapons and/or viral means of 'improving the human genome' are clearly uppermost in certain American minds.

What do they think is going to happen if they unleash some kind of bio-weapon pandemic that ostensibly targets 'only Russians'? Or if they accidentally unleash a global pandemic that will hurt Americans too because they were attempting to 'make people more docile'?

It apparently hasn't yet dawned on them that most Caucasians are of mixed descent/genotype. Additionally, attempting to 'improve' the human genome would likely backfire on them.

UPDATE 16 April 2020

See here for a follow-up report in 2018 from the above reporter on this global bio-weapons lab architecture.

See here for the original report during the Covid-19 pandemic that linked Fort Detrick with SARS-CoV-2.

When exactly did we start listening to Bill Gates about anything? Anything other than computer stuff, that is. Lately Bill Gates has been showing up on various platforms in various interviews telling everyone they can't leave their homes until there's a vaccine for the coronavirus. And who exactly put Bill in charge? Why is he acting like he's calling the shots? Why is the IT guy giving us medical directives?

In this episode of Objective:Health we take a deep dive into the agenda of William Henry Gates III, and the results are downright creepy. Bill Gates is a driven, power-hungry, megalomaniac with a strong fetish for vaccines and extreme forms of surveillance, not to mention creating technologies that move the human race closer and closer to a kind of technological slavery. Oh, and he has a depopulation agenda. The scariest thing is, despite never being elected to any political position, he manages to push through his agenda by wielding his massive wealth. So, no thanks Bill, we don't want your crappy vaccines and ID chips.

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health for some good ol' fashion Bill bashin'. Send Bill back to the IT department. Nobody wants him ruling the world.

So the War on Populism is finally over. Go ahead, take a wild guess who won.

I'll give you a hint. It wasn't the Russians, or the white supremacists, or the gilets jaunes, or Jeremy Corbyn's Nazi Death Cult, or the misogynist Bernie Bros, or the MAGA-hat terrorists, or any of the other real or fictional "populist" forces that global capitalism has been waging war on for the last four years.

What? You weren't aware that global capitalism was fighting a War on Populism? That's OK, most other folks weren't. It wasn't officially announced or anything. It was launched in the summer of 2016, just as the War on Terror was ending, as a sequel to the War on Terror, or a variation on the War on Terror, or continuation of the War on Terror, or ... whatever, it doesn't really matter anymore, because now we're fighting the War on Death, or the War on Minor Cold-like Symptoms, depending on your age and general state of health.

Comment: Here and there, rational analyses questioning the sanity of shutting the world down for months are appearing in the MSM. Here's one today from The Australian newspaper...

A street stands empty in a mostly desolate Times Square during the coronavirus outbreak in New York City.

Stay safe. Keep well. Perhaps a hysteria has gripped the nation, at extraordinary cost, when we're telling each other to take special care over a disease that in three months has killed about 60, in the main quite unwell elderly people.

Even in coronavirus hot spots in Europe and the US, there's greater chance of being killed in a car accident than being harmed by COVID-19, according to research published last week by Stanford scientist John Ioannidis.

"The risk of dying from coronavirus for a person under 65 years old is equivalent to the risk of dying driving a distance of nine to 415 miles by car each day during the COVID-19 fatality season," he concluded.

Fully referenced facts about Covid-19, provided by experts in the field, to help our readers make a realistic risk assessment. (Regular updates below)

"The only means to fight the plague is honesty." Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)

Overview

According to data from the best-studied countries such as South Korea, Iceland, Germany and Denmark, the overall lethality of Covid19 is in the lower per mille range and thus up to twenty times lower than initially assumed by the WHO.

A study in Nature Medicine comes to a similar conclusion even for the Chinese city of Wuhan. The initially significantly higher values for Wuhan were obtained because a many people with mild or no symptoms were not recorded.

50% to 80% of test-positive individuals remain symptom-free. Even among the 70 to 79 year old persons about 60% remain symptom-free, many more show only mild symptoms.

The median age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years and only about 1% of the deceased had no serious previous illnesses. The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.

Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid19 have proven to be false upon closer inspection. Many of these people either did not die from Covid19 or they in fact had serious preconditions (such as undiagnosed leukaemia).

Normal overall mortality in the US is about 8000 people per day, in Germany about 2600 people and in Italy about 1800 people per day. Influenza mortality in the US is up to 80,000, in Germany and Italy up to 25,000, and in Switzerland up to 1500 people per winter.

So far as I am aware, Sweden remains the only major Western country that has not imposed a strict lockdown on its citizens to deal with the Covid-19 outbreak. Other than a ban on gatherings of 50 or more people, and advice such as over-70s being urged to stay at home, Swedish schools, shops, restaurants and pubs all remain open. It almost seems to me that the Government there has decided to treat grown adults like they are ... well grown adults.

However, despite being a sovereign nation, with the right to set its own policy, it appears that this is not acceptable to the "international community", and the Swedish Government is coming under huge pressure to change course. The World Health Organization (WHO), for instance, recently called for the nation to impose more restrictions, saying that it is "imperative" that Sweden:

"increase measures to control spread of the virus, prepare and increase capacity of the health system to cope, ensure physical distancing and communicate the why and how of all measures to the population."

"Sweden did that, the herd, they call it the herd. Sweden's suffering very, very badly."

But is Sweden really suffering very, very badly in comparison to other countries that have imposed severe restrictions? Is it really imperative that they change course and fall in line with what most other countries have done? Or do these calls proceed from a different motive entirely: a fear that Sweden's comparatively measured approach of dealing with Covid-19 without introducing the most draconian civil restrictions ever seen and without crashing its economy might actually work and in so doing show the response of other countries to have been wildly disproportionate?

It should be obvious by now to anyone that the covid19 pandemic, whatever its origins, is being used to fast forward a "new normal" world of unparalleled government power, surveillance and curtailment of individual liberty.

We are looking already at:

Compulsory DNRs for some elderly.

Biometric chips or bracelets to monitor whether or not you have permission to be outside your home or engage in work

Drone surveillance as normal.

Apps on your phone that can detect any breach of the self-isolation policy.

Huge new police powers of arrest and detention for anyone suspected of carrying the virus.

Suspension of elections for indefinite periods at government discretion

And this is only the starter course. We can be pretty sure they are currently just easing us in. The real stuff will be rolling along in the next months or maybe years (depending on how quickly they feel able to get this on).

This is the fabric of nightmare. A worst-case horror story that is the absolute quintessence of everything the alt-media is supposed to oppose.

Comment: One silver lining to this whole police state lockdown is that it has certainly helped to separate the wheat from the chaff. It has forced us all to really show where we stand in the face of tyranny - do we call it out for what it is or shrink back and join the oppressors? For those of us still willing to stand, at least now we know who our true allies are.

It's been an eye-opener hasn't it? Jordan Peterson warned that, when it came down to a crisis situation like this, almost anyone could 'become the Nazi prison guard'. But maybe that's too wide a net to cast. Let's assume it's more like 50% could or would 'go there'.

That's quantity; what about quality? 'Fascists' is also perhaps too strong a term. Many are just 'going along to get along', but certainly some of them are thriving on it.

Authoritarian Followers comprise a substantial portion of any given population, perhaps as much as 50%. What we're finding with the 'pandemic' is that many who have fashioned themselves as 'skeptics of officialdom' were just talking. Literally, to them it was just words.

The academic who coined the term - Bob Altemeyer - has published a number of informative books on 'Right-Wing Authoritarianism', but we have found that it's NOT a simple Left-Right divide. On COVID-19, Tucker Carlson doesn't get it, yet Candace Owens does. Infowars/Prison Planet and ZeroHedge were highly active in catapulting the lies that spread hysteria and panic, yet rational articles and government decisions appeared in unexpected milieus like the Financial Times and Sweden.

While it can take study to figure out exactly which 'authority' it is that people are following in any given context, the main point you arrive at is that they are constitutionally incapable of following their OWN authority, instead transferring most of it onto the state - or whatever supranational version of it seems to rule the planet from the shadows.

Sure, they'll SAY they're 'anti-govt' or 'anti-statist' or 'anti-communist' or 'against the deep state', but it's just words. When it came down to it, the 'world government' said 'boo' and they fell right into line.

Some are suggesting that the current crisis is the end of globalization, or that it will wipe out the New World Order altogether... but they are wrong. In fact, this crisis is the globalists' dream, and what we are witnessing is the birth of a totalitarian control grid the likes of which could scarcely have been imagined before this pandemic panic kicked off. Welcome to the Corona World Order.

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